Flying Cars are a Bad Idea

"Nauraushaun" (nauraushaun12) 11/17/2016 at 20:07 • Filed to: None

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Every now and then we hear these rumors about a flying car that’s nearing production or what have you. I’m sick of it. Here’s why.

NO!

Cars are expensive to run. Fuel is expensive, so is regular maintenance - such that many owners don’t bother until something breaks. But cars cost a pittance compared to a flying car. Fuel is vastly more expensive, since they have to counteract the effects of gravity all of the time. Maintenance is vastly more expensive since it needs to be extremely reliable or you die.

Cars are getting more efficient and aerodynamic. But it’s not enough for them to fly. Things that fly need to weigh nothing and be slippery as a fish. They need to be small and narrow, or the fuel costs get prohibitively high. Goodbye seats, cargo space, practicality. A Cessna weighs less than a modern hatch, and that’s without all the comforts and crash protection and rigidity a modern hatch has. Note: this contributes to the cost of purchase/repair too.

Driving a car isn’t like flying an aircraft. You need to know what the hell you’re doing. You need to know how wind and weather works, and how to navigate, communicate and give way.

If we get flying cars they’ll be heavily compromised, and only be usable by people who are both already pilots and very rich. These people already take helicopters/planes followed by limos - why would they bother?

Fuck flying cars.

McMike > Nauraushaun 11/17/2016 at 20:11

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The thing about flying cars? They are neither good at flying, or being a car. The only thing it does well is that is can do both.

Urambo Tauro > Nauraushaun 11/17/2016 at 20:20

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Air traffic would be an absolute nightmare to control. If there was as much traffic in the air as there is on the ground today, it would be far too busy to manage via radio, like the current ATC model. And there’s no place to put lane markers or traffic signals for some kind of visual infrastructure. It would be a mess.

And hovercars ain’t gonna happen neither. The novelty of overcoming gravity by a few mere inches isn’t worth the trouble. And even if you did manage to make a hovering car, you’ve lost ALL grip and now you have to find alternate methods for accelerating, turning, and decelerating.

We are going to continue using wheels for a very long time.

Flynorcal: pilot, offshore sailor, car racer and panty thief > Nauraushaun 11/17/2016 at 20:38

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Did you know it’s required by FAA law that I need my photo on my pilot’s license yet the FAA only prints licenses with Orville and Wilbur’s face on the back. It’s been a law since the 90's. They just haven’t gotten to it yet.

Costco puts your picture on the membership card.

Even if you could get one of those things to fly safely and recover from even the slightest upset without straight dropping out of the sky, you’d need the FAA and the highway administration and a bunch of other agencies to write and rewrite a ton of laws.

I’ll point out I was wrong about them legislating drones in my lifetime so I guess pigs do indeed fly sometimes. Cars? A prototype here or there but after a few test flights ending via parachute the subsequent bankruptcy ends without one.

Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap > Nauraushaun 11/17/2016 at 20:53

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Well yeah because they’d be terrible as cars and terrible as planes too.

Nauraushaun > Urambo Tauro 11/17/2016 at 21:42

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True about hovercars. That loss of friction is great for economy, very bad for stopping

Nauraushaun > McMike 11/17/2016 at 21:45

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Jack of all trades, master of none.

IanZ - limited-slip indifferential > Nauraushaun 11/17/2016 at 21:52

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The best summary of flying cars I’ve ever read. Flying cars will never happen, should never happen, and can never happen. I’m being hyperbolical maybe, but yeah. Visibility in that thing above would be worthless on the road as well.

Nauraushaun > IanZ - limited-slip indifferential 11/17/2016 at 22:17

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Thanks. And I hpyerbolical maybe, but I think you’re exactly right.

DynamicWeight > Nauraushaun 11/18/2016 at 12:39

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Flying cars we’re a dream based on the fact that doing “work” in the physics sense was getting easier and easier. Remember, in the fifties, people still remembered when the only work multiplier available was an animal. Cars had, in recent memory, gone from puttering along at a brisk walking pace, to cruising at sustained speeds that no one in human history has ever been able to get anywhere near without taking a one way trip off a cliff.

Everyone thought we’d have more and more power available to us. And honestly, if power had kept increasing at that rate that it seemed to be, flying cars would be no problem. What many people don’t get is all our technology only exists because oil is freaking awesome. It is completely disrespected as the source of all our technology. And oil isn’t enough to make flying cars. Though it is enough for flying buses.

If we figured out something better than oil, flying cars would exist.

Nauraushaun > DynamicWeight 11/18/2016 at 22:12

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This is a very good answer. I do understand how oil has helped us so much, but why is it not good enough to make a car fly?

DynamicWeight > Nauraushaun 11/21/2016 at 11:53

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The short answer: because it is too heavy/massive for the amount of work it can do. What you need is an energy source that is so small and light (and abundant) that you can provide huge amounts of thrust very quickly. In that way, you could have something more akin to a hovercraft than a helicopter or airplane. That’s the big problem with flight: it takes too much foresight. Have you ever piloted a boat? Flying is kind of like that in that there are no brakes. But instead of having water to slow you down, there is only air drag. So you end up coasting through the air without being able to stop. I only hang glide so I don’t know about powered flight, but even in hang gliding “over shooting” the landing zone is a very real thing.

Besides the control issue, economic modes of flying (fixed wing air planes) require huge landing zones and are awkward on the ground. The only way to give every single person an aircraft is to master VTOL (vertical take off and landing). VTOL is incredibly energy intensive. Because instead of using air to give you lift and merely fighting air friction, you are now fighting Earth’s gravity all on your own. This force is so massive that landing something like a helicopter requires great skill and finesse since at any moment, the energy available for lift is barely more than force required. This makes the vehicle slow to respond. A faster responding vehicle (with proper computer help) would be much easier to land.

So because flying is so energy intensive, the only economic way to use fossil fuels to fly is to glide in a plane, or, in a helicopter, have large and heavy enough blades that their own momentum doesn’t require a lot of horsepower. If we had so much power that we could spin up and down much smaller blades very quickly, we could have a more maneuverable craft that could stop itself more quickly in air. Such a craft is much more likely to be something that a “average joe” could pilot safely since the margin for error is much larger.

Even then, though. Flying is still really dangerous. We would need a combination of rigorous licensing, trained professionals, and computer assistance to make something like this work.

Nauraushaun > DynamicWeight 11/21/2016 at 15:55

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Excellent answer